An Introduction

Hello, everyone, I hope my first blog post finds you well.  I thought I’d start off with an introductory post and a little about how I ended up here.

My journey with computers began when I was quite young.  The first memorable experience I have behind a screen was actually for math learning games.  I’m sure you’re thinking “wow, how exciting…”, but these games were actually pretty great.  I got to play space invaders with times tables!  It can’t get much better than that.  It’s what jumpstarted my learning during elementary school and led me down the path of online learning throughout my life.  It really changed the way I viewed learning and it didn’t have to come from those old, stinky books at the library.  This eventually led me to everything from video games, editing music, and creating little programs to mess with friends.

I originally started my professional career in Finance, but eventually realized it wasn’t my passion.  The main joy for me was creating macros and writing VBA scripts to automate my job.  That combined with the simple SQL queries I was writing, led me to pursue a more interesting and challenging career path.  I am currently a UX/UI BI Analyst, which basically means I create websites and dashboards for the Finance organization.  Those dashboards are then used to make well informed business decisions.  I hope to take the experience I’ve obtained and go into Data Analytics so I can provide business insights and help develop data driven strategic decisions.  Although DA is my main focus, I’d love to help work on projects relating to autonomous vehicles.  I worked on a small project creating a data pipeline at my company which will eventually be used to interpret air traffic control data from autonomous flight.  It was an amazing opportunity and I was able to work with some incredibly talented engineers.

While in school, at Montana State University, for my original Finance degree, I made a good friend and we started an investment group on campus together.  A few years after graduating, he also fell out of love with Finance and started this CS degree at OSU.  He eventually persuaded me to follow in his footsteps, and I’m incredibly happy I did.  I’ve learned so much in this program and it is actually what helped me land my current job.  It’s been a long, difficult journey but a great learning experience and opportunity to dive into CS as a whole and not just your basic “print(“Hello, world!”)” statements.

I am excited to see what this course has in store for all of us and to see what project I’ll be working on.  Quite a few of them sound interesting and I think it will be a great chance to push myself beyond what I normally do.  It will be a nice final push in this program.  While this degree has been great, I would be lying if I said I’ll be sad for it to be done this Spring.  After two and a half years, I’ll be excited to have my evenings and weekends back.

Once I have some more time on my hands, I am excited to go out on more hikes and days at the beach.  I can count the number of outdoor adventures I had last year on one hand which is quite sad.  I haven’t been able to get as much as a sunburn these last few terms, so it will be nice to switch from blue light glasses to sunglasses.

To all who made it this far, thank you for reading my first blog post and I hope you found it mildly interesting or amusing.  I am far from a writer and I’m hoping these blog posts become a fun, informative way for you to hear what I have to say about my CS467 journey.

Cheers,

Max